With the recent economic downturn and mounting health care costs, the Life Sciences Industry is looking for ways to increase revenue and cut cost as consumers are increasingly turning towards generic drugs and delaying elective surgeries. To overcome the challenges, flexibility and innovation will be the driving forces.

Spray gun analysis for tablet coating showing complex phenomena including droplet break-up and coalescence. The multiphase simulation was performed by Manesty.

Modeling the flow through nasal passages to determine the required surgical procedure using STAR-CCM+ (model provided by Lionel Meister, University of Marseille)

DEM simulates the motion of a large number of interacting particles and tracks them in a numerically efficient manner, modeling contact forces and energy transfer due to collision and heat transfer between particles. Shown is a DEM simulation for a fluidized bed.

The presented work is part of a CFD challenge investigating the potential for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations to predicted pressures and flows in an aortic coarctation during stress when conditions for the rest case are known. In our approach, we choose to couple a three element Windkessel model to the outlet boundaries.

Polyhedral mesh for flow simulation in a human respiratory system (nasal cavity up to hypopharynx).The geometry was obtained from CT-data using software Mimics from Materialise and imported into STAR-CCM+ in STL-format (surface triangulation).

The integration of CFD modeling and simulation is emerging as a game changer in the life sciences industry. For pharmaceutical companies, STAR-CCM+ is the ideal analysis invironment to develop continuous manufacturing of Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs) which leads to shorter product-process development cycles, reduced energy requirements, superior products and shorter time-to-market.

STAR-CCM+ also opens the door to explore innovative medical device designs and to aid the decision-making process for biomedical diagnostics by providing a means of gaining insight into delicate, often inaccessible areas.

STAR-CCM+ offers solutions for the Life Sciences Industry in areas including, but not limited to:

Mixing: The Eulerian multiphase model in STAR-CCM+ provides an effective means for modeling multiphase flows and is ideal for studying phases dispersed randomly in static mixers, stirred tanks, homogenizers and emulsifiers. The extensive range of sub-models provided by STAR-CCM+ include drag, virtual mass, lift and turbulent drag forces, break-up and coalescence models for bubbles, and a granular flow model.

Solids Handling: STAR-CCM+ includes a Discrete Element Modeling (DEM) capability that is fully coupled with a numerical flow simulation. DEM simulates the motion of a large number of interacting discrete particles and tracks the interaction between every particle in a numerically efficient manner, modeling contact forces and energy transfer due to collision and heat transfer between particles. STAR-CCM+ leads to solids handling solutions, whether one wants to analyze the chaotic movement of particles in fluidized beds, improve tablet coating uniformity, or filter particles in medical devices.

Fluid-Structure Interaction (FSI) : The complex FSI problems in the biomedical device industry are driven by highly compliant vessels and membranes that are structurally impacted by mechanical devices. STAR-CCM+ has a direct link to Abaqus finite element analysis through a co-simulation API developed by SIMULIA, delivering a fully coupled, implicit, two-way FSI and providing automation, efficiency and solution stability. This capability can handle FSI problems with ease, including respiratory/lung, coronary or carotid artery, heart valve and aneurism applications all the way to models of blood pumps such as LVADs coupled with patient-specific data.

Shorten Time-to-Market: STAR-CCM+ opens the door to explore innovative ways to reduce cost and shorten time-to-market for the manufacturing process as it offers acost-effective way to address scale-up problems when taking the processes from laboratory to full-scale production.